Major General Joseph Wheeler.
This hero of the American Civil War (Confederate Army) comes from the Morfitt line of our Family. The Morfitts were the ancestors of Duncan Adams' maternal grandmother, Esther Morfitt. The General does not appear in the main genealogy as he flows from a descendant of a sibling of an ancestor (as mentioned in the introduction to our genealogy).
On the Morfitt genealogy, you will find our ancestor Richard Newlove (1706-1750) and you will find he had six children, one of whom was Hannah (1750-1834). In 1771, Hannah married John Harper in Staffordshire, England. They had ten children, one of whom was John Harper (1773-1849) born in Yorkshire, England.
John Harper married Ann Sessons (or Sissons) in 1801 in Yorkshire and they had five children, one of whom was Richard born 1809 in Yorkshire.
Richard Harper married Martha Smith and they had nine children, one of whom was Hannah Margaret Harper.
Hannah Margaret Harper was born in 1789 in Yorkshire and died in 1882 in Ontario, Canada. She married James Handley (1788 - 1854) and it is clear it is they who took the family across the Atlantic. They had eleven children, one of whom was George Henry Handley.
George Henry Handley was born in 1827 in Yorkshire, England and obviously emigrated with his parents as he too died in Ontario, Canada (1906). He married twice, latterly to Kathrine, with whom he had seven children, one of whom was William James Handley.
William James Handley was born in 1851 in Picton, Ontario and was a potter by trade. He married Ann (Amy) Wheeler. Ann's father was Major General Joseph Wheeler'.
The general was born in 1836 and died in 1906 in New York when he was buried the Arlington National Cemetary.
Joseph Wheeler was the only Confederate general to attain the same rank later in the United States Army. Three decades after he commanded Confederate cavalry forces, he volunteered at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and was commissioned a Major General of Volunteers in Cuba. He later became a Brigadier General of the Regular Army in the Philippines.
Fresh from West Point, with strong personal convictions and unshakable courage, he fought for his native Georgia at the outbreak of the Civil War and won fame as a cavalryman. During the Civil War he was in more than 500 skirmishes; commanded in 127 full-scale battles; had 18 horses shot from under him; and lost 36 staff officers from his side.
"Fighting Joe" moved to Alabama in 1869, practiced law, and operated his plantation in Lawrence County. He was elected to Congress in 1884 and to successive terms until 1898, when he again entered military service. It was his intense desire to show that Southerners could be counted on as citizens of the United States that prompted him to volunteer, at 62, for service in the Spanish-American War. Alabama honored its beloved fighting man by placing his bust in Statuary Hall, Washington, D.C. The nation honored him in 1937 by naming the dam across the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals for "the South's fightingest general."
A book has been written about him: 'From Shiloh to San Juan - The Life of 'Fighting Joe Wheeler' written by John P. Dyer.
The following web site links are rich in additional information:
A Google search will bring up many references.
